Worst Roommates Ever?

Inspired by the “My Roommate Smells” thread, what about other stories about horrible roommates?

That has to be one I witnessed. A friend of mine moved into a communial house. What he failed to realize was that this house had a bit of a problem … namely, the guy that lived in the basement.

At first, it was the smell and hygene. Since he lived in the basement this was bad, but standable. After all, the guy was friends of a sort with the other people who lived there.

Then came the junk … this fellow would haul home tons of junk and stuff it in the basement. And I do mean “tons” quite literally. Eventually, the basement was so full of old beds, broken TVs, and mounds of paper, you couldn’t see how anyone could squeeze in at all.

Then, he stopped paying rent.

Well, they (the rest of the roomies) had enough, and went to confront him about it … but he acted so strangely and belligerently, they backed off. They were all intimidated by him.

Sensing this, the guy in the basement started to terrify them - poping up out of his hole to scream meaningless abuse, then on other occasions acting really friendly like they were all still best pals. He was observed to be collecting knives - large knives. Eventually, he took to brandishing said knives during his rants - not at anyone, but just in general. Very intimidating. He seemed to know this, and derive satisfaction from it.

The other roomies got really, really worried. They didn’t know what to do, and starting a physical fight, beating the guy, up seemed a bit extreme and likely to lead to injury or criminal charges - plus, they suspected the fellow was actually going insane. They called the police.

Turns out they were right - he was, in fact, suffering from some mental disease. He had stopped taking his medication. The cops came, took him to the hospital, and a day later he was back … and still not taking his medication!

His family was notified, but were essentially uninterested.

Well, they called the cops again. This time, they changed the locks while he was away [it turns out that, at least in this jurisdiction, you can’t be hospitalized against your will unless you commit a crime - smelling bad, not paying rent, collecting junk, and acting in an intimidating manner don’t count, even if you are refusing to take medicine].

He came back, and shouted at them for awhile. They told him (through a locked door) that they would put his stuff out in the yard. He went away.

Well, not for long … he broke a window and got into the basement. They locked the door to the basement. They called the cops again, but this time, whenever the cops came, he seemed to dissapear - into the huge pile of junk, which was riddled with burrows and hiding places prepared (apparently) for this purpose. The cops refused to burrow through the junk, and told the others to clean it out first - but the others refused to clean it out unless they had police protection.

The others had all had enough. They told the landlord (who knew all about the situation, but was just as helpless) that they were all moving out, and if he tried to sue them for the remainder of the lease, he was welcome to try.

Then they left. For all I know, that guy is still living in that basement, in his warren of garbage.

I had a roomate wake me up in the middle of the night by fondling my breast.

And then physically assault me.

No, I don’t have good memories of it.

oh I’ve had some bad roomates:

One started dating a guy I was seeing (behind my back nonetheless). I end up breaking it off with the guy for various reasons. Two days later, I come home from work to find out he has moved into our apartment (into the roommate’s room). I was furious. The argument that ensued very nearly ended in bloodshed.

I moved out and in with bad roommate #2. Well, things were fine at first, he was a bit of a slob, but no big deal. We lived together for a year before I left for 3 months out of state to do my internship. While I was gone, I faithfully sent my half of the rent every month. I got back to an eviction notice and a mess the likes of I had never before seen. Turns out roommate stopped paying his half of the rent while I was gone (along with utilties, phone & cable bills… all of which were in MY name) instead he blew all his money on cocaine (which I had no idea that he used). There were dishes in the sink that had been there since I left. There was food in the fridge that I was afraid had started growing legs. He had a cat… the litterbox hadn’t been changed probably since I left… therefore the cat had used the rest of the apartment to go to the bathroom. There were questionable “stains” on my bed. There were litterally piles of pizza boxes up to the ceiling. The garbage hadn’t been taken out in 3 months. Beer bottles everywhere, including several crammed into a hole in the wall. Used condoms draped over various objects in the rooms… I could go on but you get the picture.

Those are all some bad roommates - not sure anyone can beat a roommate sexually assaulting them, for sheer badness.

The worst roommate I ever had was a freak. (Co-op apartment situation; none of us knew each other before moving in)

He insisted everyone in the apartment use their own toilet paper. He wore latex gloves around the house so as not to encounter anyone else’s germs. He left notes and signs all over the place; for example, if someone left a magazine on the table, there would be a sign above it that said “Magazines are to be kept in your room” or something to that effect. One time, a bunch of my food (we all had individual food) went missing, and I questioned everyone about it. The only person in the apartment during the time it disappeared (over a weekend) was this guy, but he INSISTED it couldn’t POSSIBLY be him because he didn’t eat “that sort of food.” He stayed up til all hours of the night playing loud video games with lots of bass and sometimes woke me up at 4 AM (his room shared a wall with mine). And the worst part was when, after I had asked him not to eat my food, some random kitchen stuff (a wok stand, a cake pan, etc. random stuff, not particularly interesting or pawn-able) went missing. Only to reappear two weeks later. Apparently, that was to “teach me a lesson” or something.

The guy was a freak. But he was not the worst roommate I had ever known about.

That honor goes to a girl who had been a good friend of several of my friends who all lived in a house together (“The Big House,” we called it). She had also been a good friend of mine in high school, and was putting herself through college. She held it all together for a while, but had to drop out for a semester and some Shit Went Down. She lost her housing and asked to move into the Big House. It was a Big Mistake, as she consistently didn’t pay rent, was awake for days and then slept for days, became the bitchiest person I’ve ever known, ate other peoples’ food without asking or replacing it, didn’t feed her rats or take care of them, so they would breed and then eat their babies/each other to stay alive, etc. Finally, the roommates all got fed up with it and told her they were putting her stuff in the garage, and she could come get it or they would sell it (she was 3 or 4 months behind on rent at this point). One of them killed her rats out of mercy, since nobody else in the house wanted them or wanted to take care of them, and they were all sickly. She eventually got her stuff.

Two weeks later, when the guys were cleaning out the pantry, one of them found a bag full of used needles. Like, hundreds of needles. Good thing he looked into the bag before he stuck his hand in.

I felt really sorry for her, but she really brought a lot of that stuff on herself, and burned just about every bridge she had. I saw her once, a couple of years ago, walking on Market Street in San Francisco (I was on a bus). I hope she got things together and got back to school, because she was incredibly smart, just not as good as she had thought at balancing partying with school.

I once lived in a three-bedroom basement apartment. My roomies were friends and we got along well. But the guy upstairs…!

Every few weeks there’d be a different car in the driveway. He wasn’t there a lot. Okaay… a bit odd, but nothing smelled, the silence wasn’t bad, etc.

Then I got a four-hundred-dollar phone bill with all these calls to Germany. I disputed the calls. The phone company sent someone out to look at the lines in the house, and I took the afternoon off work to meet them. Turns out the guy had physically wired a new extension into my phone line. And was phoning hither and yon to conduct a quasi-legal car-brokering business. And was printing my phone number on business cards. And was giving the cards out to people in South America.

The guy eventually skipped town without paying the rent. My landlord got a new family in upstairs.

By this time the phone-company anti-fraud people were well on the case. I eventually heard from them that the guy had been arrested in Germany for speeding on the Autobahn. Twice. By the same cop. Never heard of him after that.

After that, the unending sound of the tricycle rolling over my head as the children upstairs played was almost a relief.
I now live by myself.

My worst roomate was my sister, the last two years of college. She was a typical spoiled rotten youngest child (I was a typical spoiled rotten oldest sister) and had been harboring a hatred/resentment of me that was stunning. One day she blew up at me over something trivial and that led to a fight where a knife was brandished and eventually it was agreed that we would no longer be rooming together, effective immediately.

Her next roomate was pretty awful. Rachel saved the boxes for everything she bought and returned nearly every appliance or what have you once she was tired of it. Her room was so stuffed with boxes you couldn’t walk on the floor or close the door. That made nights when her drug dealing boyfriend stayed over quite educational. She stopped paying her share of utilities and had the boyfriend intimidate my sister in the hope this would be overlooked. When she was asked to move out she just dissappeared for weeks. Came back, said she was pregnant and refused to leave her room. A few days later she was gone, came back that evening, said she’d had an abortion and didn’t feel well. Somebody came looking for the boyfriend and made all sorts of threats while Rachel got more sick and said she needed to go to a hospital. Her parents came over, waded through the scary people on the landing, gathered up Rachel and left. My sister changed the locks that night but never heard from Rachel again. Her Dad came for her stuff a few days later and refused to speak to my sister, just pretended he didn’t see her. Never paid her for the back rent or utilities either.

For more than a year after that my sister would get calls from people looking for Rachel; she evidently wrote tons of bad checks and had used scholorship money but then dropped all her classes. The drug people were much more understanding and went away after a couple of months.

Guess an over-acheiver big sister didn’t look so bad after that fiasco.

Where I went to school, there were many who aspired to the title of ultimate roommate from hell. But there was one who stood out proudly above all the others. No idea what her real name was – everyone just referred to her as Goosey. She was only there for a short time, but the legend will never die.

According to Michelle, her much-pitied roommate, Goosey didn’t clean her laundry for an entire semester. She didn’t seem to feel it was necessary. She believed that wearing panty liners every day made up for not washing her underwear. As for the rest of her clothes – well since she always took them off when she got back from class and lounged about in the buff (not a pleasant sight, I understand) Goosey felt that they got all the airing out that they needed. In a pile on the floor, of course.

As if this weren’t enough, Goosey apparently had an aversion to taking out the trash. Michelle noticed a particularly nasty stench emanating from Goosey’s laundry stack and was sufficiently intrigued to investigate. She discovered a trash bag that contained (among other things) rotting food, a stunning number of used panty liners, and even several used tampons.

Michelle went straight to the Housing Office and demanded to be moved to another room. Her wish was granted. Goosey left school at the end of the semester, but left all of her stuff in the dorm room. The first two teams from maintenance that went in to remove Goosey’s effects were nearly sent to the emergency room after getting physically ill.

Doesn’t compare with drug users and criminals, but pretty hellish nonetheless.

I have a very simple solution to that problem…

Simply go to the nearest Hunting store,

Buy the biggest box of Dynamite Sticks they have,

Take them back to that junkyard house,

and start blasting your way from room to room till you find him…(or “it”)
Call the city’s waste disposal dept and have them send over the biggest truck they can find…

and have them haul EVERYTHNG IN THERE AWAY, INCLUDING HIM :eek:

Wow! Some of these stories are really shocking! I feel so lucky, all the people I live with are great.

Actually, thoughts of flooding the basement with water were expressed.

The easier solution of moving out was adopted.

So - when can we expect their stories about you?

[Just kidding! :smiley: ]

Well some of those stories do seem familiar… :smiley:

Of course I’m kidding too. I’m a fabulous housemate. Really!

I didn’t know it was my worst roommate until the day we vacated the apartment.

We were both returning to our respective home states at the end of the college year.

He decided to make a huge mess as a “practical joke on the landlord”, shredding newspapers, covering the carpets with shaving cream and spraypainting his name all over the walls in the kitchen.

Fortunately, the landlord could believe it was just him and I just lost my cleaning deposit but didn’t get sued.

A guy like that may be a pain in the ass, but he can also be a source of entertainment. I roomed with a guy who demanded that the newspaper be “stacked in the same size square it started out in”. This was in college. I took that as a cue to see how many square feet could be covered with a single daily issue of the Columbus Dispatch.

I’ve had some bad roommates too - one who later got arrested for kiddie porn, and one who was a hardcore alcoholic, secret ex-con (murder was tha rap), and who ended his colorful run as our roommate by driving his car the wrong way up a highway, crashing into an oncoming car (resulting in the death of the other driver), and leading the police on an interstate manhunt culminating in him blowing his brains out.

But for some reason the thing that stands out is the guy who stored his used Kleenexes in a big drawer…shudder He is now a rich radiologist somewhere in Michigan.

Ever since you took that taxidermy course, your roommates have been just perfect.

Now, if only their pesky employers, friends and family will accept that they all went on vacation together to Bermuda, and stop bothering you …

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Where do I start?

In my second year of university my SO and I decided to move in together, but since the relationship was only a year old, we felt it would be best to have roommates, just for added company in case things went bad. Through a series of unfortunate events, we ended up renting two rooms on the ground floor of a house with 4 other guys that we didn’t know. We had been intending to move in with a couple of other people, but things just didn’t work out.

So, out of those 4 guys, only one was decent. He cleaned up after himself, and kept fairly quiet hours, and was often at his girlfriend’s place anyways. The only annoyance was having to shuffle cars in and out of the long driveway, but since his was a nice Audi A4, I didn’t even mind that too much!

Then there was T. I posted a rant once in the Pit about him - I called him Thunderfeet the Egotistical. He was very loud, and very selfcentred. He drenched himself in cheap cologne whenever he went out - even just to go to McDonalds. His room was directly above ours, and he had a habit of sleeping in til 4pm, then staying up all night to watch TV and do homework. Unfortunately, he liked his TV on LOUD, and his sound system had a subwoofer. When he did homework, he liked to stomp around his room to think (in a 40 year old house, where the floors squeeked) while listening to really mediocre dance music at full blast. EVERY request to have him stop, and to be quiet during the night led to indignant arguments that it was HIS room, and he could do whatever he wanted. Pointing out that the entire house was awake at 3am because of him didn’t phase him one bit. T. also had a habit of stockpiling meat in the freezer, and then eating nothing but McDonald’s and pizza. So the freezer was full of meat he wouldn’t eat, and he got mad when we tossed some of it out. He allowed a bag of onions in his drawer to rot - or, I should say - liquify. The fruitfly infestation was HORRIBLE! He used our pots and pans and plates and never cleaned them. In fact, I don’t think he ever cleaned ANYTHING. And what’s worse, is the dishes would pile up in the sink, even though we had a DISHWASHER.

And K. Quiet guy, from somewhere in the philipines I think, with absolutely no idea how to live on his own. His mom had done everything for him. He once was all proud to have started the dishwasher - but he’d forgotten to add soap. He said he didn’t know he needed to. At least he made a moderate effort! But the worst was his eating habits. He ate a lot of fish. A LOT of fish. Fish that wasn’t always totally fresh, and so the entire house would REEK whenever he cooked. And he tended to cook late meals - like 2am late. Nothing quite like being woken up at 2am to the smell of fish. He once prepared crab and dumped bits of it into one of the two sinks, but then piled his dishes over them…the kitchen REEKED, and it took us a week to figure out where the hell that stink was coming from. His family once came to visit - mom, dad and sister - and for an entire month they stayed in his bedroom. They’d pop down for food, then stay up there all day, every day. Very weird.

M was the fourth guy. At the time, he seemed ok, and while we knew that his bedroom was unliveable by our standards, that was his space and so it didn’t bother us. We all three opted to move out of the house into a nice 2 bedroom apartment (my SO and I would share the master bedroom, he’d get the small one). I guess he only seemed like a good roommate in comparison to the other guys!

M didn’t really do his laundry, though he did shower every day, so it wasn’t SO bad. He’d go home every few weekends, and likely did a BIT of cleaning, but some things, like his bath towel, never got washed in the 6 months he was with us. I remember once, near the end, he’d soaked it through somehow, and hung it on the shower rod to dry. It was dripping BROWN water. He insisted on using our nicer dishes all the time, rather than the older, more versatile set, and would use our (expensive) wine glasses for milk. He broke one once, and lied about it. He’d occasionally let food spoil in the fridge. Whenever he ate, food would end up all over the kitchen counter, floor and dining room table and he would never clean it up. He never once cleaned the stove or counter, or swept the floor, or anything. His idea of doing the dishes was to run them under hot water for about 5 seconds. When he shaved, the bathroom would seem COVERED in shaving cream. He didn’t pay his utility bills, despite monthly reminders (though when he moved, he gave us an approximate lump sum, since we threathened to deal with his parents if he didn’t). Basically, he was just messy, and we were always having to clean up after him.

The worst part, though, was his girlfriend. R was manic depressive, and had attempted suicide when we lived in th first house. She once dumped M, started going out with some other guy, and kept trying to make M be friends with him. When other guy dumped her, she came running back to M, and he took her back. The tended to throw fits over every little thing, and refused to take medication since that meant she couldn’t drink - and she was, IMHO, an alcoholic.She wasn’t happy in her basement apartment, and at one point M asked if R could move in with us. The apartment simply isn’t big enough for 4 adults, and so we said No. Within the week, however, she was spending 6 days a week at our place, she’d cancelled her cell phone and was giving out OUR phone number as hers (someone once actually attempted to call her COLLECT, on our line - I told them to fuck off and that she didn’t live here…while she was sitting 3 feet away). She spent her days skipping class and using M’s computer, while neither he nor her had paid us for phone and internet. She seemed to think it was free, even when we approached them on the issue. She was even messier than M, if that was possible.

The straw that broke the camels back was in early November 2002. On the weekend, my SO and I had spent about 3-4 hours cleaning the apartment from top to bottom. The place gleamed. They came in on Sunday night, made some food and went to bed. They got up earlier than us and made pancakes, and he had shaved, and then he left for classes. When we got up, we noticed shaving cream all over the sink and mirror, pancake batter all over the kitchen (including the floors and walls), OUR maple syrup all over the dining room table and OUR placemats, they had tracked mud across the living room to his desk, and up the hallway into his room, and she was sitting at his computer using “free” internet and talking to her parents - a long distance call - on our phone.

I told her that we’d spent HOURS cleaning up, and to clean up after herself and M. Her response? “I have my own apartment, I don’t have to clean this one”

:eek:
:mad:

I pointed out that she was HERE 6 days a week, and that she’d better clean up, or she wasn’t welcome here. In fact, M was gone for the day, and so she should leave, since she wasn’t welcome when he wasn’t here. She said something along the lines of “M wouldn’t like the way you’re treating me” and I told her I didn’t care - he didn’t scare me in the least. A bit more yelling back and forth, and I left for school. Neither one were home when I got home.

M came home later that night and told me he wasn’t happy living here, and he didn’t feel like it was his home, and he didn’t like how I treated R. I told him I didn’t care, and he was free to leave if he wanted - my SO and I had agreed that we could handle the rent ourselves. He told us he’d stay the month, until he could find another place, and at the end of the month he moved to another building with R. They fought on the day they moved - I HOPE they got fed up of each other and realised what horrible people they both are. To add insult to injury, when they moved, they STOLE kitchen stuff from us. Apparently M had “accidentally” washed all the water glasses and mugs and some storage containers and then “accidentally” packed them. He even took a pair of my shoes, gods only know why. We contacted him through his parents and told them that we wanted our things back, or we WOULD call the cops - the stolen things weren’t high value, but it’s the principle of the thing! He returned our things a few days later - by leaving them dirty in a plastic bag in front of the super’s office, with the apartment number on a tag. The super wasn’t happy, but neither were we. He was a total wuss - too afraid to face us.

Since then, my SO and I have been living alone (well, with the cat) together in this apartment, and we love it. We will never again have roommates, other than each other (and any kids we might have, I suppose!)

Gah, just writing this all out got my blood boiling. How can people be SO AWFUL??

Yeah, I used to derive great satisfaction from doing stuff like that to my first roommate. She couldn’t relax and watch tv unless the set was perfectly centered on the towel she kept it on, and the towel was perfectly centered on the top of the mini-fridge (we were in the dorms.) So I’d give her towel a tweak when she was out of the room, move it maybe a quarter of an inch, and settle in to watch the fun. Of course, I’ve realized in retrospect that she almost certainly had OCD, and now I feel a little bad for torturing someone with a mental disorder. Then I think about her hanging up on people who would call for me and pouring her Diet Coke in the floor, and I feel much better about it all.

If it’s any consolation, Dr.J had a classmate in med school that everyone called “Booger” behind his back. At least your radiologist might have been conducting some sort of experiment or study. This guy just a had a real bad case of finger-up-nose disease.

There was a great thread about this a long time ago, and one dude posted a couple stories about his (dorm) roommate, who, among other things, would pull the covers over his head and smack the guy when the poster was there (!?!) and worse, would audibly slurp his venomous coconut jam out of his hand when he was through! God, that was an awesome story.

Back when I lived in the dorms, whether or not you got your own room was based entirely on age. Because I was lucky enough to turn 19 in December (the deadline was Dec.31st IIRC), while my hapless friends didn’t reach legal until March or later, I never had to share a room. God was I glad of that.

For the most part, my friends roommates were just normal annoying - they would go to bed early, or get up late, or cough really loud, or they were messy, or whatever. When you’re sharing a 20x20 room with someone you’ve never laid eyes on before, I guess they get on your nerves eventually.

But one of my friends had the roommate from hell. She talked on the phone ALL DAY LONG. She was messy. She borrowed my friends stuff all the time without asking. She was snotty and obnoxious and said horrible things that made the other girl cry almost every day. So, one weekend, my friend went to her parents house to recoup a little. She came back on Sunday night and found, to her surprise, that everything was as she left it - no roommate in sight. So, off she went to have a shower - only to find her electric shaver clogged with thick, black hair.

Did I mention that she was a redhead?